There's a name for America's anxiety about the future: the 'Trump effect'

By Nicole Hemmer

October 24, 2016 — 5.05pm

Election day in America is an odd civic holiday. People still go to work – it's not that kind of holiday – and until a few years ago some states banned liquor sales for the day. But there is nonetheless an air of festivity and anticipation: squeezing in a trip to the polls, wagering on the outcome, gathering with friends to watch the results roll in.

Like so many other parts of the 2016 race, however, the run-up to this election day is different. The atmosphere is thick with momentousness mixed with let's-get-this-over-with. If most election days are like a civic Christmas, this one is like a looming surgery date. It's necessary, and the outcome will probably be OK, but there's always a chance something could go wrong.

Donald Trump's refusal to say whether he would accept the election result spread genuine anxiety through the electorate.Credit:AP

Americans fight viciously over politics, but not since the 1968 election has there been such a widespread sense of trauma accompanying a race. That year was scarred by assassinations, riots, and war. This one has been scarred by Donald Trump.

Trump has been a singularly corrosive force on the body politic. And not just on those old enough to vote. Earlier this year the Southern Poverty Law Centre identified the "Trump effect," the growing anxiety among school-aged children, particularly non-white children, about what the election would mean for them and their families. As the election has dragged on, the "Trump effect" has transformed into a more general label for the trauma inflicted by the election.

Advertisement

It would be tempting, especially for Trump supporters, to blame this on the media, to argue that liberal fear-mongering has heightened the anxiety and fear across the country.

Tell that to Melissa Hill, a mother from Brooklyn who was eating lunch one day with her five-year-old son when he suddenly asked, "Is Donald Trump a bad person? Because I heard that if he becomes president, all the black and brown people have to leave and we're going to become slaves." Trump's actual policies may have gotten garbled on the way from his stump speech to the playground, but the message came through loud and clear. Hill's son, who is black, understood he wouldn't be welcome in Trump's America.

Tell it to David French, a conservative writer who has been a leading figure in the Never Trump movement. Trump supporters, enraged at his opposition, sent him images of his adopted daughter, who is black, being shoved into ovens. The family endured months of harassment. One day, when his wife was on the phone with her father, a Trump supporter hacked into the call and started screaming at her.

Tell it to the women who have experienced sexual assault, who heard in the Trump Tape the entitlement and derogation that made those assaults possible. Who then had to listen as Trump called his accusers liars, threatened to sue them, and suggested they were not attractive enough to violate.

Tell it to the scores of Muslim Americans who have been attacked in the last 10 months. Hate crimes against Muslim Americans have spiked during 2016, up 89 per cent over 2015. That's the most significant spike since the months following the September 11 attacks.

Tell it to the journalists who have been flooded with some of the vilest anti-Semitic imagery circulated since the Third Reich.

None of this is a media creation. It's what the world looks and feels like when a major party candidate legitimates white supremacy, nativism, and misogyny.

Earlier this year I wrote a column arguing that Trump was gaslighting America. Gaslighting – a term many readers were unfamiliar with – is a word normally reserved for domestic abuse: the act of manipulating, lying, and bullying a person in order to make them question their perception of reality.

The column went viral, and the idea has become a popular metaphor for explaining the felt experience of living through the Trump campaign. It especially resonated in the campaign's early days, when the trauma Trump was inflicting on women and minorities was largely discounted while journalists focused on the economic anxieties of Trump voters.

In recent weeks that has changed. The Trump Tape helped expose the depths and dangers of Trump's sexism. His refusal to say whether he would accept the results of the election spread genuine anxiety through the electorate. Sixty-five per cent of Americans disagree with his hedging, most of them strongly. That disapproval helped Clinton open a 12-point lead over Trump in a recent ABC News poll, one she had led by four just two weeks ago.

Ironically, Clinton's strong lead may help ease the anxiety that is driving it. But it will not fully heal the trauma of the 2016 campaign. For that, election day marks not an end but a beginning, the first step down a long road of recovery for the American people.